“I do,” I said quietly.
“No,” he retorted, “you do not. You have not visited a house in mourning, you have not worn the trappings of a widow, you have not sat in painstaking silence at a breakfast table straining under the weight of an absence that should not be.” He took three strides in my direction, caught himself and changed the angle so that he strode past me.
The lump in my throat hurt.
“My father behaves as he always has, but he’s withdrawn deeply from all but matters of Parliament. He does not reach out to Mother, who is too proud to ask.”
This I understood, for appearances were paramount in all matters above the drift. I had thought myself the unwilling heiress to these things, and now I understood how little I’d been affected by it.
For all my gilded cage above, I had been permitted remarkable freedom.
As gently as my trembling hands allowed, I set tea cup and saucer upon the table. “Earl Compton—”
“Do not call me that.”
If I had ever thought to hear the sound of heartbreak, I never could have imagined it to come from Piers Everard Compton.
The denial echoed so deeply as that I often utilized myself, and the ravaged rasp of his voice so keenly felt, that I could not stop myself even by way of reason. As my already weakened heart fractured, I stood, ignored all signs of warning, and crossed the parlor to wrap my arms around the young lord’s back.
He jerked once, arms stiff as a board and back steeled, but he did not pull away. He did not deny me.
In truth, as my cheek came to rest between his shoulder blades and my arms tightened at his waist, the earl lost his silent war.
A sob racked his lean frame.
I clung to him with all my might. Though I knew his pride would take something of a beating for it, I did not gentle my embrace—would not allow him to think himself alone. My own tears echoed the sorrows of a family I could do nothing else for. I could only encourage him to weep as I wagered he had not allowed himself to prior.
He and I were remarkably the same. I had drawn comparisons once given our shared predilections for the smoke, but it had never occurred to me until now just how similar I might be to my late husband’s wayward brother.
The shoulders before me slumped, and steel flowed to salt and fatigue as Piers turned in my grasp. I braced for a push, a wresting away. I opened my mouth to form the apology I thought might suit my temerity, but he freed his arms, breath shuddering out, and caught me close.
A glimpse of his features, reddened and raw, damp with tears, silenced any protest I might have made—not that I’d thought to try. That his mouth twisted into a mask of fiercely contested sorrow told me that this fall from lordly grace was long overdue.
Perhaps the same could be said for me. I’d already broken a too-long dry spell during my convalescence, and now it seemed that tears came all too easy. Yet there was something different about this moment.
Perhaps it was that of all who could offer comfort or sympathy, none quite lived the loss of Cornelius Kerrigan Compton as he and I did. We drew from each other the poison we had both resolved to preserve.
And for all that, my pain was so much smaller in scope than that of a brother who had shared a lifetime.
I let him cling to me as I held him tightly, rubbing his back as he sobbed in mingled fury and grief. One hand cradled the back of my head, practically cocooning me within his embrace, for I was too short to allow him to hide his face against my neck as I imagined Adelaide would permit.
I hoped that from here on out, he might show her this side of him.
The tears I cried vanished into his coat, and I cried them silently lest I jar the moment into self-conscious regard. This time was not mine to indulge.
After some long minutes, when Piers could once more regain himself, his grip across my back eased. I took a steadying breath; he did the same.
When his hands came down on my shoulders, I was prepared for the abrupt manner in which he distanced himself from me. Embarrassment colored his features, as the sudden loss of composure softened the stern lines that did not wholly suit him. “That—That is, your pardon...” He patted at his coat, only somewhat absently.
I suspect it saved him from having to look me in the eye.
He had no handkerchief to use or to offer, for he had already left it in my care. I had not the presence of mind to bring it with me when I was so unceremoniously carted out of my home.
I caught his searching hand between mine. “Lord Piers,” I said, “I can’t ask you to forgive me. I cannot forgive myself,” I admitted, earning a sharp look. “But please believe me when I say that I spent every waking moment after my lord’s death seeking revenge.”
Piers’s eyebrow twitched. “Did you acquire it?”
“Did I acquire revenge?” When he nodded, I smiled tightly. Even I knew how grim a slash it looked. “I did.”
“Who was it?”
My fingers tightened, and he clasped his other hand around mine. I could not tell him the truth, that it was the third son of Viscount Armistice Helmsley the Third that had committed such a horrendous act. In the name of love for me, no less.
Teddy had always been my friend, my steadfast supporter during the many balls and soirees of a Season. I had no doubt that given the hedonistic nature of the viscount and his sons that Piers himself had known Teddy well.
I did not want to smear that. To cost Piers reason to doubt his judge of character the way I had come to doubt mine.
So I said only, “A collector.”
He looked down at our clasped hands. “Is he dead?”
I swallowed hard, forced the lump back before it burst. “He is.” By way of a railway train, no less. Unlike the specters of my parents, I did not expect Teddy to rise again. Not from that.
“Good.” The strength with which he squeezed my hand ached, but I didn’t believe it on purpose. “Perhaps,” he said slowly, “it is better this way.”
I had no credible words with which to argue, so I did not try.
“Will you return to Society?”
Wincing, I disengaged my hands from his and pulled up the too-long hem of my borrowed dress. “What would you prefer?”
He had the grace to avoid a lie. That he had to think about it was telling.
I returned to my seat, and the cold tea I drank nonetheless.
“I think,” he said thoughtfully, “that you would prefer to settle affairs with the Menagerie.”
“I would.”
“Do these matters involve the Karakash Veil directly?”
“Yes,” I said, unsurprised by his knowledge of the enterprise. Lord Piers had been among those considered peculiar enough to be invited to the Menagerie’s most decadent events, after all. Hawke had even offered to forgive Piers’s debts in exchange for my vow never to return below.
Did he owe the Veil as I did?
Not that many could owe quite as I did. At worst, the young lord owed coin.
“Mm.” Piers crossed the parlor once more, but only far enough that he might fold his lanky form into a chair. He had always been less broad than his brother, though perhaps that came from the smoke. Certainly it had done me no favors. “Ashmore is the name of your guardian, is it not?”
I froze.
This time, when he laughed, it did not cut. “His barristers are engaged with ours in the matter of your marriage. Honestly, Cherry, if you want to be free of all of this, I cannot see what it serves you to deny the title my brother bestowed.”
I flinched, hiding it behind a careful sip of my tea. “I suspect your mother would not like that. And really,” I added quickly when his nose wrinkled in preamble, “I just want my fortune back so that I can...”
“What?” he asked, not unkindly. “A woman alone?”
I was not so certain that alone was what I wanted anymore.
I looked away.
Lord Piers took pity on me. “Ah, well,” he said, waving it all away. “Prepare a contingency, my l
ady. I fear your case does not bode well.”
“Why?”
“There is some legal question as to the state of your, ah...” His mouth pursed for delicacy’s sake, but his eyes glinted. “Innocence.”
I bolted upright, as though my spine turned to an iron rod. “What?”
He raised his hands. “I am simply sharing that what I know. If your guardian’s barristers choose to pursue annulment, you will be asked to verify the state of your purity to an attending physician.”
Given the sudden heat infusing the whole of my head, I had little doubt the often hedonistic lord understood.
He was not so much a gentleman that he would let it lie. “Given your rather fair skin has turned the color of your unmistakable hair, shall I assume my brother’s charms ensured this evidence is no longer, ah, in attendance?”
Not entirely correct. I was no virginal miss, but it had not been to Compton’s favor. I could not say so, not to the man’s own brother.
I already felt the villain in this production.
“You,” I said, raising the fragile tea cup to my face as thought it might provide shelter where there was none. “You shut your gob.”
His laughter bore no sympathy. On the other hand, it did not sting as it had.
A certain truce found in a moment of shared grief.
His amusement faded, leaving him looking all the more weary for it. His pale eyes, so like his mother’s and brother’s, half-masted; though I wondered at the thoughts such a languid expression masked.
I did not have to wait long. “If you complete whatever you are meddling in now,” he told me, “come and see me again.”
Certainly, I could give him that. I inclined my head. “I promise.”
Chapter Nine
To his credit, Lord Piers did not argue when I asked to borrow his attire. He left me to sort out the things I needed to traverse the street. I heard him leave by way of the front door, perhaps to give himself some air—rancid as it was outside the carefully maintained filters he’d obviously had installed for his lady’s benefit.
It must gall to be trapped with me. I sympathized immensely as I rolled the hem of a pair of entirely too long trousers. Piers’s waist was larger than mine, which made lashing it down comical at best. Nevertheless, I borrowed an informal jacket of herringbone tweed—generally too fine for an urchin as I resembled, but it wouldn’t be the first bit of apparel nicked by a bantling and worn for boasting rights.
I left the lovely blue dress upon Miss Turner’s perfectly made bed, careful not to wrinkle the skirts any farther than I had already.
I wondered what it meant that I had begun to miss wearing pretty dresses. Or perhaps it was something else that I associated with them that I missed—such as my family. Not my parents, may their souls forever rot in peace, but the family that had taken me in when I was but a devil child in denial for my new life.
Fanny had always been the mother I’d never had. I missed her dearly, but the loss of her companionship and that of my staff was the price I paid for this double life I had chosen; a double life that had become only one.
This one.
Was there any room in this new life—this identity that I had not yet fully formed without smoke to fill it—for those I had only come to love wholeheartedly after I had chosen to leave them?
I could, all too well, hear Fanny’s appalled words in my head as I peered at myself in the vanity mirror. I had never seen the woman swoon outright, though I suspected she might have were she to see me now.
My intent was to become something not worth looking at, but the obviousness of my hair was still too red, especially against the brown tweed jacket. And no one in their right mind would fail to recognize me as a female, even with the thick braid hidden down the back of the coat.
When all else failed, there were older tricks I’d come to abandon over the past few months.
My boots left unfortunate bits of dried mud in my wake, and I mentally apologized to the mistress who would be forced to sweep it, but time was of the essence. It had been less than half of an hour since Maddie Ruth and her companion had departed.
When Piers returned fifteen minutes later, so measured by the clock upon the wall, he found me working a handful of black into my hair. A bit of oil and soot combined to make an old trick, learned by happy accident years ago. It dulled my hair, turned it black as the night sky with none of the gleam.
Piers halted in the entryway of the parlor, an eyebrow rocking upwards. “You provoke the damnedest things.”
I smiled from underneath my elbows, crouched by the dwindling fire. “They will be searching first for a female with red hair.”
“That hair has always marked you, hasn’t it?”
A fine grit drifted like a cloud into my face, and my nose twitched. “Well-remembered,” I managed just before I muffled a sneeze.
As he watched me, I scraped my blackened fingers once more over my braided hair and scrubbed them across my cheeks for good measure.
He snorted a laugh, promptly covering his mouth with hands he’d stripped the gloves from. His amusement, warm though it was, quickly faded. “Are you truly a collector?”
“I am. For some years, now.”
“Mm.” A thoughtful noise. “I don’t truly understand what it is you do. The collectors I know have never quite evoked this image you present.”
“Society collectors,” I sneered, scraping my nose across my borrowed sleeve. The lord’s eyelids flinched. “Oh,” I said, staring down at the blackened sleeve. “I beg your pardon.”
“No, no,” he returned, albeit it somewhat weakly. “Please keep it for future, ah, endeavors.”
Terribly sweet of him. “Any word yet from Maddie Ruth or your lady?”
“None.” He did not sneer or wince at my use of lady, as some lordlings might. Adelaide Turner was no lady, but I liked that Piers thought her near enough for his purposes.
“Keep an ear out for the rear exit, then,” I said, glancing again at the clock that ticked and tocked in mindless rhythm. “Maddie Ruth will send a bantling—ah, a child runner,” I amended for him.
“Right, then.” Piers acknowledged, for all he could not hide the bemusement with which he regarded me.
We lapsed into a silence that was not overly easy, but companionable enough. I did not feel as though his stare weighed upon my shoulders like a verdict of guilt, but he did not look at me directly very often.
Perhaps I continued to pluck those emotional chords that he regretted now.
I did what I could to be as unobtrusive as possible, which meant a great deal of twiddling my thumbs and watching the clock hands shift. He pottered about. We shared this kinship of awkward awareness. The tableau in which I had trapped him, the mixed emotion with which he regarded me, made for unusual bedfellows in Adelaide’s pretty parlor.
All that I thought to say seemed like a hammer to the fragile glass of the peace we held, and so I said nothing at all.
Instead, I sat upon one of the young lady’s paisley armchairs and watched the fire crackle and pop.
It seemed to me that for some time, I could not look at the heart of a flame without being reminded of Micajah Hawke. That unusual streak of blue in his brown eyes had always made me think of the color buried in the very center of the fire, and now was no different. That his gaze was mostly blue spoke of esoteric matters, for I knew of no physical ailment that could change a man’s eyes so easily.
The question I had to ask myself was a blunt one: Was Hawke still Hawke, for all his perceived differences?
I dwelled on this subject for a time, mulling it slowly in the silence of the parlor.
Although I might accuse the ringmaster of a hedonistic streak to rival any in Society, I could not believe that he would treat any woman who visited his prison as he had me. The first time I had freed him from the shackles forced upon him, he had claimed my body.
This time, I had not touched the locks, but he had claimed a kiss.
T
he pad of my thumb smoothed over the small bump left by the flash of his teeth, a reflexive gesture I had not realized I’d done until a small pain flared underneath the pressure. Frowning, I tucked my hand back to my lap.
The facts as I knew them were slim. Hawke was most definitely under the influence of something I did not yet have a label for, and thus I had no ideas on how to fix it—if, at all, it could be fixed. What could make a man alter so much that he show three faces instead of one? The wicked ringmaster, the vile showman and the unseemly beast were all aspects of one—and yet were I to put a fine line upon it, I’d say that the showman and the beast were simple extremes of the ringmaster he’d been.
Did that mean the true Hawke was as I’d once known him, kept in balance by weight of some internal will or external source?
How would I go about verifying this?
The Veil was not a helpful source. I had learned only two assumed truths—an internal fraction appeared to have afflicted the once-unified organization, and the Ferrymen could only have achieved such power in Limehouse with the Veil’s wherewithal. There was no other explanation. Were it any other way, the residents of the district would not be so easily quelled.
Say what I would of the Chinese immigrants I knew little enough of, they bore strong ties to one another.
The Chinese girl might have had more answers, but neither of us were in a position to ask them. After witnessing Hawke’s unbridled assault, I could understand rather more clearly what she’d meant by threat of devouring.
Yet I remembered all too clearly how he’d plucked the blade from the air, how he’d pulled the Veil’s footmen from me.
How he had avoided hurting me direct.
Was it wishful thinking on my part?
Piers returned to the parlor to take seat upon the sofa, a book in hand and gaze firmly not on me. Whether or not he intended to ignore me, or if perhaps he—like me—did not know how to break this silence, I was not certain.
I shifted in my chair, leaning my head back against the brocade.
If Hawke was that tiger they likened him to so often, and the Veil claimed the role of the godlike dragon, why bother keeping him around? Unless the Veil preferred to keep that what it saw as dangerous and show it off as they did their lions.
Engraved: Book Five of The St. Croix Chronicles Page 13
